A Single SkyTran Track
Carries up to 14,400 Commuters Per Hour!

How Can SkyTran Claim to Move as Many Commuters per Hour as a Three Lane Freeway?

First - How many people per hour does one freeway lane actually carry?
Here in California, CalTrans has measured that the average freeway lane at its best carries about 3,000 cars per hour. If we assume the Cal Trans figure of 1.2 people per car that works out to 3,600 people going by per hour. Thus, three lanes at best will carry 10,800 people per hour.

We are claiming SkyTran can move 14,400 people per hour! This is actually the equivalent of 4 freeway lanes not 3! However, let's be a bit more realistic and realize that the 14,400 condition assumes 2 People are riding in each two passenger Pod. (This is akin to assuming 5 people would be riding in every automobile! If we use the same 1.2 people per vehicle that CalTrans uses, then you can rightly quibble we would only be carrying 8,640 people per hour. If the government discontinued forcing car pool lanes on us, commuter automobile ridership would probably be down to 1.001 person per vehicle real quick. We humans like personal transportation! When commuting to work, we want to go at a time we choose and we want to go as directly as possible to our chosen destination. Simple as that! For the same reasons, SkyTran ridership will realistically be 7,200 people per hour per lane (which is actually the equivalent of 2.4 freeway lanes).

HOW??
The more important question one should be asking is just HOW can we safely squeeze 7,200 SkyTran vehicles per hour per overhead monorail track lane? That is simple - just use a one half second spacing interval per vehicle and precision radar controls. There are 3,600 seconds in one hour and 2 vehicles coming by each second equals 7,200!

Automobile traffic is not that tightly packed because humans need more reaction times than computers do. Most, not all, drivers follow other cars with a spacing that they are comfortable with. Normal drivers do not relish focusing their entire concentration to follow right on someone's tail for minutes or hours on end. Without any mathematical formulas, whatsoever, we all figure out how close we can follow and still get safely stopped if something weird happens just in front of us. We know the vehicle in front of us CANNOT instantly STOP! We adjust our spacing mentally by simply including a factor for the distance the other driver would take to stop once we see his brake lights appear. (You may have read about a section of a San Diego, California freeway that is currently being used to test automatic computer driven automobiles. The cars travel at 65 MPH autonomously - while spaced just feet apart from each other. The benefit in tightly packing traffic is more people per lane per hour, which means less congestion, and the elimination of building more $24 million per mile freeways to carry the ever growing traffic.)

Public Transportation Braking Laws
Public transportation, such as trains, on the other hand, have to follow unreasonable braking laws which have nothing to do with the reality of physics. Trains cannot legally follow each other any closer than the distance required to make a complete stop. This is analogous to you having to be completely stopped by the point along the freeway where the driver in front of you tapped his brake lights. We all know this point has nothing to do with where you could possibly ever contact his car. His car cannot stop instantaneously! We all have learned to sense from assorted little cues whether or not the driver in front of us is paying reasonable attention or off in la la land (tough to check by looking directly into their eyes). Years of driving experience allow us to trust that the person in front will hit the brakes and gradually slow down and not just go piling stupidly into a stalled truck or whatever.

What do these train laws have to do with SkyTran?
Mainly, it got us thinking about just what would it take to still follow that train braking law and keep our high density 1/2 second spacing! If you are traveling at 100 MPH, you are covering 146.7 feet each second. Another SkyTran could be 73.3 feet in front of you (one half second ahead). Guess what, we can take great advantage of our SkyTran MagLev drive unit being trapped inside the hollow, roll formed, monorail track. What if we include a hydraulic brake (for emergency use only) that could squeeze against a rib that we also roll formed into the track (it runs the entire length of the track)? Then, no longer is emergency braking deceleration limited by the traction capabilities of rubber tires on asphalt or concrete!!!

Superior braking has tremendous safety implications!
If we assume we can let the on-board radar computer take 50 iterations to detect, confirm and apply this hydraulic brakes (50 milliseconds = .05 second) and we further control the hydraulic squeeze pressure to give us a constant 6 "g" deceleration, we can get fully stopped in a mere 55.6 more feet. Including the 7.4 feet used up while the computer is making up its mind, the total distance is 63 feet. This actually meets the train braking law requirement - WOW!

Whoa, Man!
Won't my body be wrecked and my brain be scrambled if I am subjected to 6 "g's"??
Hardly! The interesting reference chart below shows how the "g" levels ordinary humans can take varies with the kind of restraint system being worn. There are acceptable "g" level zones where no injuries occur; higher zones where injury is very probable; and even higher zones where death will surely be the result. You can readily see that 6 "g's" is well below the threshold for injury.

This next table gives the times and distances it would take to slow down (from 100 MPH to a complete stop) for an assortment of deceleration "g" levels. Each level is associated with a vehicle and/or condition.

(** It is important to point out that NASA data shows the limits for humans to sustained 6.0 "g" decelerations (eyeballs out direction) is 4 minutes (240 seconds) for performance and 5 minutes (300 seconds) under emergency conditions. The extremely rare SkyTran 6 "g" emergency deceleration from 100 MPH is all over in less than 1 second!)